The adoption we deserve. I have bitcoins, but they don't accept them from me, because these bitcoins do not pass some kind of fucking verification from a third party. All my crypto life I "dreamed" of such crypto freedom.
Allow me to quote a post I made a year ago:
Here's an analogy:
I am a merchant. You want to buy some things from me. You try to pay with cash. I say "I cannot see the full history of this cash, so I refuse your money". So instead, you tap your debit card. I say "I cannot accept this money without knowing the full history of it". I demand access to your bank account so I can see where all your money comes from. You leave and come back with your bank statements, but I don't like what I see, so I refuse payment. You then try to pay with PayPal. I demand access to your PayPal account so I can see where all your money comes from. You unlock your PayPal account on your phone and hand it over for me to look at. This PayPal money looks OK to me, so I accept it. You then leave the shop and start telling all your friends "Make sure when you shop there you have all your bank statements with you so the merchant can look at them, and make sure none of your money comes from anywhere except your employer, since they can't trace those funds." Your friends all look at you like you are crazy, and then simply choose to shop with the merchant next door who doesn't do any of this nonsense.
Whenever this situation comes up, with the discussion of centralized exchanges and privacy, it always seems that the default position is "Sacrifice all your privacy and let people spy on you so that you can use a centralized exchange". In any other financial situation that would be seen as utterly crazy, as I've just shown above, but for some reason with bitcoin people just accept this nonsense? The problem here is not mixers, or coinjoins, or Monero, or any other privacy technique - the problem here is centralized exchanges. If you don't want a centralized exchange to seize your coins, then don't use a centralized exchange. There are plenty of decentralized exchanges to choose from.
The logical position when faced with entities which are stealing coins is not "I should bend over backwards and sacrifice everything to hopefully mean they don't steal
my coins!", but rather to simply not use the entity which is stealing coins.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.
If all bitcoin users, collectively, completely ceased to use and support any such exchange or other service which implemented such blacklists, then the whole provably nonsense concept of taint would simply cease to exist. The only reason that some coins can be deemed as tainted is because we continue to use services which fund the very entities who made up this bullshit.
Any time you come across an exchange or other service which makes you pass some kind of fucking verification, as you say, then A) stop using them and find an alternative, and B) encourage others to do the same as well. This is the only way bitcoin will actually give us the freedom we are looking for.